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"The next blockbuster therapy is probably already in your pocket or purse.

The FDA recently approved the first prescription digital therapy, Pear’s Reset app and program, which is focused on substance abuse. Others are likely to follow. That means your next trip to the doctor could include a prescription for a mobile app in addition to, or instead of, medicine.

Digital therapy represents a powerful yet provocative new idea in health care. Software brings a precision to therapy and with it an ability to personalize treatment. This gives digital therapy a big role to play as we transition to value-based care.

These aren’t purely academic or technological questions. They are ones we need to take seriously as we look to curb our country’s dependence on prescription drugs and find better, more effective options for treatment. At the same time, the health care industry continues to embrace a focus on prevention. The emphasis on wellness and health management has driven new thinking about how to engage people well before they become patients."

MWC18 Folk soon need not look up from their screens when boarding aircraft and wandering the aisles thanks to an alliance formed by OneWeb and Airbus to bring 5G roaming to the skies.

OneWeb, which hopes to launch the first of some 900 satellites into low Earth orbit this year aboard a Russian Soyuz-ST from the Korou Cosmodrome in French Guiyana, plan to make the announcement during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Both OneWeb's satellites and mass-market 5G are currently as substantial as the clouds in the sky. However, the data slinger promises a campaign from August that will see a satellite launch every three weeks until it reaches the 900 target.

Boffins will be hoping that there is no repeat of the quality issues that caused the loss of a Soyuz back in November 2017, when programmers accidentally entered the wrong coordinates for the launch site into the rocket's guidance system.

That error sent the payload, a weather-monitoring satellite ironically named "Meteor", tumbling back to earth in a fiery display visible from a British Airways flight heading from Montreal to London.

Competitors such as Inmarsat are already offering airlines the ability to sell connectivity-starved customers the ability to tweet pictures of their inflight meals to the masses, but the OneWeb proposition differs significantly."

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"Mobile phones may be behind a surge in a deadly brain tumor, scientists say.

Cases of glioblastoma in England soared from 983 to 2,531 between 1995 and 2015, figures from the Office of National Statistics reveal.

The rise was across all age groups and came as cases of lower-grade tumors fell.

Experts say “widespread environmental or lifestyle factors” are likely to be responsible for the trend, with mobile phones a potential suspect. The findings are published in the Journal of Public Health and Environment.

Study leader Alasdair Philips, of Children with Cancer UK, said: “We found a sustained and highly significant increase in GBM throughout the 21 years and across all ages.

“Interestingly, we found the highest rise in incidence in frontal and temporal regions of the brain. This raises the suspicion that mobile and cordless phone use may be promoting gliomas.”

Professor Denis Henshaw said: “Our findings illustrate the need to look more carefully at the mechanisms behind these cancer trends instead of focusing only on cures."

It can be hard to concentrate when you’re always being diverted by your phone. It’s a pattern that scientists say creates something they call the switch cost.

Research shows constant interruptions can create a different chemistry in the brain.

“There’s this phenomenon they call switch cost that when there’s an interruption we switch away from the task that we were at and then we have to come on back. We think it interrupts our efficiency with our brains, by about 40 percent. Our nose is always getting off the grindstone, then we have to reorient ourselves,” said Dr. Scott Bea, a psychologist at Cleveland Clinic.

The new reality for many is that technology has put the brain on high alert most of the time, waiting for the next notification. Doctors say when it happens, people can get little surges of the stress hormone cortisol, which can cause the heart rate to jump, some people to get sweaty hands and muscles can get a little tight.

Being unable to check phones immediately can cause those feelings of anxiety to last until people are able to check their device. Doctors say breaking that pattern involves creating a new habit, which can take time."

"(Phys.org)—Researchers have fabricated a smart skin that is self-powered by its frictional contact with the objects that it touches. When a honeybee crawls across the smart skin, the skin not only senses the insect, it also uses the spontaneous triboelectric charge that builds up between the honeybee and the smart skin to power its sensing ability, eliminating the need for batteries. The smart skin could have applications for robots, artificial intelligence systems, and bionic limbs for amputees.

The researchers, led by Haixia Zhang at Peking University in Beijing, have published a paper on the new smart skin in a recent issue of ACS Nano.

"For conventional electronic skins or smart skins, they all need a power supply," Zhang told Phys.org. "This is a serious problem. It's awkward for users to take a thin, flexible and light-weight smart skin together with a hard and heavy battery that can work only for hours. The self-powered smart skin fundamentally solves this problem."

As the scientists explain, triboelectric charges occur anywhere two objects touch each other, although these charges are so small that they often go overlooked.

"Imagine a scenario where you walk toward a table to get a cup of coffee," Zhang said. "Opposite charges will be generated on the surface of your shoes and the ground. Then when you pick up the cup to drink, the opposite charges will be generated on the palm of your hand and the handle of the cup. Furthermore, when you swallow the coffee, the charges will even be generated between the surface of your digestive tract and the coffee. We utilized these spontaneous—but often be ignored—charges to make our smart skin totally self-powered."

Smart skin, who'd a thunk it? We are getting dumber by the minute. Helping amputees will be the lesser reason for developing this technology. That person standing next to you, may not be a real person, after all. Creepy!

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"TORONTO — Behind a cloak of shrubbery in a gritty Toronto neighborhood lies a brick duplex, the home of Bianca Wylie, a 39-year-old mother of two on a mission to upend big tech’s latest pet project: “smart” cities. In a living room office overflowing with books and baby toys, Wylie settles into an armchair and unspools the story of how she found herself up against the mother of all Internet companies.

In October 2017, Sidewalk Labs, a Google-affiliated company looking to make urban life more streamlined, economical and green by infusing cities with sensors and data analytics, announced plans to build the world’s first neighborhood “from the Internet up” on 12 acres of the Toronto waterfront, an area known as Quayside. Sidewalk aims to, for example, build an “advanced microgrid” to power electric cars, design “mixed-use” spaces to bring down housing costs, employ “sensor-enabled waste separation” to aid recycling and use data to improve public services.

The company’s long-term vision is to expand to the adjacent Port Lands, a valuable 800-acre tract of industrial waterfront. And from there, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at a press conference to unveil the project, to “other parts of Canada and around the world.” Quayside will be “a testbed for new technologies,” Trudeau declared in rousing tones. “Technologies that will help us build smarter, greener, more inclusive cities.” The media was then treated to a series of utopic renderings of a futuristic neighborhood featuring driverless buses, green-roofed condos and carefree children
running barefoot amid butterflies.

Wylie, however, has zero tolerance for smart city PR-speak. “The smart city industry is a Trojan horse for technology companies,” she told The WorldPost. “They come in under the guise of environmentalism and improving quality of life, but they’re here for money.”

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Smart pills can transmit data to your doctors, but what about privacy?

I.Glenn Cohen, Alex Pearlman Sept. 19, 2018

"Medicines that record when they have been taken are already being prescribed. Ethical issues must be addressed, say the writers of the article.

Your next prescription might include pills with embedded sensors that can collect and transmit data on whether you’re taking them as instructed.

Abilify MyCite, a pill-app combination that can be used to track the ingestion of drugs for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, was the first such product approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in November 2017. Its roll-out to some Medicaid patients was announced last month.

“Smart pills” like these are part of a larger class of digital medicine products that include insulin pumps with continuous glucose" at this point I discovered a pay wall in my way, so just be aware this is happening.

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"Have we reached peak smartphone? Are we just impossible to impress any more thanks to a case of been-there, seen-that with most handsets? Maybe it’s that more of us are hanging on to our devices for longer than ever — and maybe it’s a little of all of the above. Whatever the reason, though, global smartphone shipments were down again in the third quarter, the fourth consecutive slump in shipments.

Market research firm Strategy Analytics is out with new data showing a year-over-year decline of 360 million units, the equivalent to an 8 percent dip, in the third quarter, with Strategy Analytics director Linda Sui going so far as to declare the smartphone market “effectively in a recession.”

“The smartphone industry is struggling to come to terms with heavily diminished carrier subsidies, longer replacement rates, inventory buildup in several regions, and a lack of exciting hardware design innovation,” she said.

A separate research firm, IDC, is also out with findings that more or less match up with those of Strategy Analytics. We’ve summarized the most interesting results from the research below.

Samsung, no surprise, is still the king of the global smartphone hill. It’s got a 20 percent market share and shipped a little more than 72 million units during the third quarter — but that was 13 percent less than the third quarter of 2017. Huawei, meanwhile, is continuing to nip at Samsung’s heels, shipping almost 52 million smartphones during the quarter (a 32 percent gain). It only has a 14 percent global market share, in part because its phones have little to no presence in North America."

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You can lace Nike's Adapt BB shoes with a smartphone app, but that's just the beginning

Jan. 15, 2019 Jessica Golden

Source: Nike
Nike Adapt BB basketball shoe

"Nike provided a glimpse of what the future of footwear could look like by introducing the first self-lacing smart basketball shoe on Tuesday.

The Adapt BB, priced at $350, does more than just lace itself. Using a power lacing system called Fit Adapt, users can adjust to find the perfect fit whether it's manually or digitally, using the Nike Adapt mobile app. A custom motor and gear train tighten or loosen to customize to your foot.

For Nike, this opens a new world of smart data insights into athletes' workouts. For athletes, it represents a new era and way they interact with sneakers.

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"Athletes will be able to update and evolve their shoes with upgrades, new features and services all through smartphone technology inside their footwear," said Michael Donaghu, Nike's vice president of innovation.

While Nike touts this shoe as a "mobile sports research lab on feet everywhere," the shoe currently doesn't provide any data, but the company said that will be coming.

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"Children are spending an average of 23 hours a week on smartphones and other gadgets - twice as much time as they spend conversing with their parents, polling suggests.

The survey of 2,000 families with children below the age of 14 found that on average they were spending 3 hours 18 minutes a day on personal devices.

By contrast, they were found to be spending 1 hour 43 minutes a day engaged in conversation with members of their family.

The polling follows new advice from the chief medical officer, which urges parents to take more control over their children’s digital habits, and ban smartphones from family meals, and from bedrooms at night.

The survey found four in five parents said they had tried to persuade their children to spend less time on their personal devices. And two in five admitted to giving children devices in order to keep them occupied.

Overall, children were found to be spending an average of 23 hours a week isolated on their mobiles, tablets and games consoles at home, almost double the 12 hours they spend conversing with their parents."

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"When we’re not in front of a TV or computer screen, many of us spend the day attached to our phones, checking them long after natural light has faded outside.

It’s increasingly recognised that the blue light emitted from these devices can disrupt our body clocks and sleep patterns, but now doctors warn it may also damage our skin and eyesight.

Much of the research is at an early stage — but meanwhile, chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies has said that at the very least people should turn off their tablets, phones and computers before bed.

Risk: Last year, U.S. scientists published research suggesting that blue light might damage vision and speed up the onset of blindness

There is increasing concern about the impact of computer or smartphone screen use and “blue light” upon human health,’ she said in her annual report in March last year. ‘Research is ongoing and this is an important area of investigation.’

Here’s what emerging evidence suggests:

IT MIGHT HURT MY EYES

Blue light, also known as high energy visible light (HEV), is part of the visible light spectrum, which is formed of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet light.

Blue to violet light has the shortest wavelength on the spectrum — the shorter the wavelength, the higher its energy.

Last year, U.S. scientists published research suggesting that blue light might damage vision and speed up the onset of blindness. Researchers at the University of Toledo found that prolonged exposure to blue light triggers toxic molecules in the eye’s light-sensitive cells, killing them off — a process that leads to macular degeneration, a common cause of sight loss

The lab-based study, published in the Journal Scientific Reports, found that blue light triggers retinal — a protein in our eyes that senses light — to create poisonous molecules in the photoreceptor cells (specialised cells which respond to light).

There were no changes when the cells were exposed to green, yellow or red light — only blue light affected them."

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SKIN DAMAGE

It’s thought that blue light, like UV light, can prematurely age and damage the skin — indeed some dermatologists believe that they can spot someone who takes a lot of selfies, or identify which ear they hold their phone to, just by examining their skin.

U.S. dermatologist Dr Zein Obagi has said: ‘You start to see a dull, dirty looking texture on one side of the face.’

Dr Jean-Louis Sebagh, a private London-based dermatologist, says he sees examples of ‘screen face’ in his ‘younger patients, the selfie generation’. He points to his own research in 2013 and 2014 exposing artificial skin cultures to blue light for six to 12 hours — mirroring the amount of time that many of us spend in front of screens each day; this found ‘considerable oxidative damage’ to the skin, through cell ageing, uneven pigmentation and inflammation.

Blue light can penetrate down to the dermis, the deeper layer of skin where collagen and elastin are produced, making skin thinner and more fragile, explains Dr Stefanie Williams, a private London dermatologist."

Please read this article and consider if you, or your children could be receiving too much exposure to the dangers coming from "blue light". I'm not positive about protective screens for smart/cell phones, but you can buy them for computer monitors.